Street Photography Is Alive & Well At Vancouver Capture Festival
Thursday, April 07, 2016
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Alan Jacques - Skateboarder - 2004
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Because I
am an impatient kind of photographer I eschew street photography. I appreciate
and admire that pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson. I note his patience for waiting
for the decisive moment to occur.
When few people carried cameras, street photography was rare and exclusive. Now it is all around us and to me much of it has become humdrum and banal. I can imagine career photography critics, “The juxtaposition of the verticals and horizontals with the immediacy of those diagonals and the ability of that photographer to frame quickly make this photograph a superlative one.” To me that is nonsensical as most photographers (at least this one) shoot by instinct and do not take all that stuff into consideration at any moment when they are shooting.
My days
as a street photographer began around 1962 and ended in 1964. The bulk of my
Mexico pictures I took then. I did a few more in the early 70s. Mexico was
always a ripe place to exploit street photography. There were the markets, the
churches, the cemeteries and that “all so photogenic” poverty. I participated
in an exhibition in 1963 at Mexico City College. I had taken photographs of the
beautiful city of Guanajuato in a trip with art students. My photographs were
awarded the first prize, I got newspaper coverage on them. Best of all, my
award was signed by the judge who happened to be the noted Mexican painter,
Rufino Tamayo. I thought for a while that perhaps I could be a photographer.
But I soldiered on (unsuccessfully) in engineering until the differences
between capacitance, inductance and resistance short circuited my career. I was
saved by conscription into the Argentine Navy.
Once I
arrived in Vancouver in 1975 I found the landscape beautiful (when I see a
lovely landscape I hold off and buy a postcard) but the city itself cold and
boring. It was a beautiful city in spite of its architecture. The cemeteries
simply did not compare with the Mexican ones. How could an almost 100 year-old
house compare with a 500 year-old one?
I imagine
if I went to Bruges or Venice I would shoot some streets, probably with my
Widelux or Noblex panoramics. The exotic always seems to be elsewhere. But not
always as my friend Alan Jacques is amply proving at the VisualSpace Gallery 3352 Dunbar St. One of the three partner/owners is Yukiko Onley.
Jacques
does have some exotic Paris photographs but the ones that amply prove that the
exotic can be found at home are his Vancouver photographs, many taken on the
corners of Main and Broadway. Jacques technique is to lie low (on the pavement
and with a waist finder with his Nikon F-2 he waits for that decisive moment to
happen. It is very difficult to shoot low and vertically (you would have to
twist your head to look into the finder) so all the photographs, all in b+w are
horizontal. The prints are from the custom printer Trevor Martin who never
adds any of his feelings to the photographs he prints. His interpretation is
neutral so the photographer’s intentions are never clouded by unintended drama.
I recently
received another invitation (this is Vancouver’s celebration of photography
month called Capture) from a photographer (I had never met him) called Scott MacEachern.
I was reluctant to go (street photographs, again!) except that MacEachern had
taken the trouble to invite me personally. So I went to the the Moat (!) Gallery at
the Main Branch of the Vancouver Public Library and saw many colour photographs
(all horizontal again!) taken most recently in Havana. While there were indeed
some that featured American cars of the 50s the photographs astounded me in
many ways. For one this man must be invisible. There is a photograph that has
an array of over 10 people on the street, in windows, in balconies and not one
of them is looking at the “gringo” photographer. The bulk of the photographs
all have a feeling of a man who knows when to shoot from the hip. MacEachern answered my question ,"Why are they all horizontal? " with something like,"My world is horizontal."
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| Havana photograph by Scott MacEachern |
And then
the whipped cream of the dessert were prints (ABC Photocolour) that were
inkjets printed not on that fashionable art paper but on photographic paper.
The result is a manageable (and most pleasant low contrast), smooth skin textures
and colours that while not quite pastel are in that direction. This is a
photographer from the 20th century who avoids punchy colour and extreme
contrast.
Congratulations
to both photographers for helping to wake me up and to appreciate very good
street photography.
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